Writing 7.0: The Four Criteria, Decoded Sentence by Sentence

What separates a band-6.5 sentence from a band-7 sentence under each of the four official criteria — the exact word, clause or connector that changed, and why an examiner reads it differently. Updated for 2026: where Writing on Paper is offered, Part 2 weighs the real trade-off — typing makes fixing a sentence cheap, so by hand more of your revising has to happen before the sentence goes on the page.

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Category:Band-Score Targeting

Contents

1. Part 1 — The four criteria, past the summary
2. Part 2 — What changed in 2026 — Writing's own version
3. Part 3 — Task Achievement / Task Response, sentence by sentence
4. Part 4 — Coherence and Cohesion, sentence by sentence
5. Part 5 — Lexical Resource, sentence by sentence
6. Part 6 — Grammatical Range and Accuracy, sentence by sentence
7. Part 7 — One paragraph, decoded across all four criteria
8. Part 8 — Checking your own progress
9. The end

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